Jaleh Rezaei: Top Strategies to Organize and Achieve Your Business Goals

Don't sit there and plan and plan and plan. Make sure that, you know, you get out there with the content as fast as possible. So in my opinion, even if you're trying to design the world's biggest program or build the, you know, this really big hairy feature, in a week you should be able to get early signals on it to decide whether you should invest another month into it. And so I always, you know, with my team, as soon as we come up with something, I'm like, great, Where are we going to be at the end of the week?

What's up, everybody? I'm Chris Ronzio, founder and CEO of Trainual, and this is Process Makes Perfect. As always, we're talking with experts in process creation, automation, and delegation— basically, the people that know how to make business easier. You just heard Jaleh Rezaei, and this episode is all about the process of personalization. Jaleh is the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, a YC-backed company that focuses on helping SaaS companies personalize their website for each visitor. Prior to Mutiny, Jaleh was employee number 12 and head of marketing and business development at Gusto, who we're partners with, where she grew the company from 500 to 50,000 customers in just 4 years. Before that, she was director of product marketing at VMware. So she knows marketing. What I loved about this episode is Jaleh tells us their process for customizing your website to speak to all different customers to maximize your sales. We also go through how they've used experimentation through their growth hacks to really grow the company and how they operationalize their goals with their weekly and quarterly meeting cadence. You'll get a lot out of this episode and hopefully you too start to experiment and personalize. Check it out. Can this business thrive without the owner? You got to start putting systems and processes in place.

If you don't use the systems, the business will break.

We're always looking to buy back our time.

You cannot say something once and expect that it actually is received.

This is the way we work.

A big motivation in that for me is creating a job for myself that I really enjoy.

This is how you discover your vision. And this is Process Makes Perfect. Welcome to Process Makes Perfect. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio. And as you heard in the intro, today we're talking with Jaleh Rezaei. Jaleh, welcome.

Thank you for having me. How are you?

I'm great. I'm excited to chat because you probably know more about personalization than anyone else I've talked to. I saw you for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt when you were on the stage, and so now we're going to dig in deep to what this whole movement of personalization and customization is because it relates so much to process.

Absolutely. Let's do it.

So, so I know before you started your company Mutiny, you came from Gusto, which was a really fast-growing company. So can you share with share with everyone just kind of what you did there and what made you take the leap into your own business?

Yes. So I started at Gusto around 10-ish employees. All of us worked out of a loft in San Francisco, kind of similar to where we were at with Mutiny. And I started there running business development and partner marketing, and then it expanded to running all marketing and BD over my 4 years there. It actually very much led to the creation of Mutiny. Before Gusto, I was at VMware, and we had really large deal sizes. A lot of our go-to-market and customer acquisition was around helping our sales team personalize their conversations to the persona or the industry of the prospect that they were talking to. Then at Gusto, of course, we were selling to small businesses. We didn't necessarily have a very large sales team. We actually didn't have sales for my first couple of years there. I hired some of our first sales teams, and so we had to figure out how to bring a lot of that personalization and customization that customers need in order to understand how we could help them into the online world. And so we built a lot of different types of personalization there within our landing pages. Some of it we did manually, some of it we did with the help of the growth engineering team that was dedicated to marketing. Ultimately, I realized how impactful personalization could be and how challenging it is to do it well without having a really good technology to help you with that. My co-founder, he's also from Gusto. He was an early engineering manager. We left to start Mutiny.

Did it feel like there just wasn't a tool in the market to do this, or it wasn't easy enough, or what was the spark?

Yeah, I mean, there is both a science and an art to personalization. And nothing really helped with the art, meaning what do you personalize for whom and how. And then on the science part, there was a lot of work that had to be done by engineers to wire together the right data sources for personalization, to be able to make changes to web experiences that required designers and front end, you know, we had to have a lot of analysts take a look at data in order to kind of understand what were the most important segments. And so across the board, it was just really challenging to do personalization in a scalable way without any kind of additional technology, which is why we had to build a lot of our own.

Yeah, makes sense. Okay, so you started Mutiny and you, you, you knew that there was an opportunity here. You know, to me, personalization is all about creating a better experience or a better process from the customer's perspective, right? But it seems like an endless rabbit hole where you could customize everything. So how do you know what's the right amount of customization for your customer? How do you put the least effort in to get the most impact?

Yeah, absolutely. We call it the 80/20 of personalization, and I actually just did a training session for some of our customers a couple of days ago on this. Yeah, so I think a lot of people assume that when they have to do personalization, they have to change every aspect of their website. And the reality is that when a visitor comes to a website, they actually skim the website and they tend to look at a few really important things that pop out. So top of the fold, the headline, the call to action, they, they look a lot at the logos and the case studies, as well as things like the feature headers and the bottom of the page CTA. Things that take a really long time to create content around are actually things that most visitors don't really look at in detail. It's these bigger things that pop that end up drawing in their attention and make them interested to engage more with the company. We've been very successful helping our customers focus on the pieces that matter and not to spend a ton of effort trying to rewrite every word of their website. In addition to that, I would say, let's say you want to do industry-based personalization, and there might be 8 industries in which you're interested in. We help them prioritize based on the size of the different groups. Within Mutiny, we have the capability to show you who are all of the different audience segments that are coming to the website and how big are these different groups and what's their conversion Usually, you can start with just your top industry or your top geography or returning visitors versus new visitors. You create large groups, and you experiment, and you figure out kind of what works for them from a personalization standpoint. Then once you have that, then you have a playbook, and you can go and stamp that out really easily for other industries or geos, etc. Then we also analyze the website, and we look at the different visitors. We look at winning experiences across the aggregate customer base, and we make recommendations around what segments should be personalized for and how. Our customers can also, if they don't know where to start, they can basically just look at our recommendations tab, which is a really data-driven way. To, to approach what they should be focused on.

And I love that you call the recommendations playbooks, right? Inside, inside the application. So that's really cool. If you could pick one thing for a, for a business owner to focus on, what's the quickest win or the thing that you see most people change and get the best results? Or maybe you've got a case study you can describe that they made this one change and it totally opened things up for them.

Yeah. So the biggest, I would say changes that tend to work really well across the board is there's, there's 2 playbooks. One is separating out self-service and startups from larger enterprise users and making some changes to the homepage, as well as the call to action for those 2 different groups. And then the other one that seems to work across the board is customizing the social proof to the industry that the visitor is from. And those are both pretty easy changes to make, and we see them have an impact of somewhere between 30% 40 to, for one of our customers, about 200% increase in leads. Wow.

So customizing social proof based on industry or company size or something like that?

Yeah, absolutely. So Amplitude changes all of their logos throughout their site based on the industry that the person's coming from, and anyone who sees that personalization has, they get 54% more leads from that segment. And then the example of self-service versus enterprise that I was thinking of is one of our customers Livestorm, they do webinar software, and they serve both self-service but also enterprise, and so they have a— they delete certain things on their site for enterprises, they change the call to action, they highlight features that are more relevant for large teams, and that has increased their conversion with an enterprise quite substantially.

Yeah, it's so interesting, and when I first started to learn about this, you know, you I think there's big retail stores that have these signs across their whole store, the departments or the areas where if you want to shop for women's clothes, you go to that floor or that section and it's very easy. But yet websites are this, you know, one-size-fits-all approach for a lot of businesses. So it's smart that companies are starting to invest here.

Yeah. I mean, that's a really good point. And it reminds me of, you know, Carta is a big user of Mutiny and what drew them to Mutiny was that They were like, "We have a lot of different messages for different audiences." Their product works across the board beautifully for all of those segments, but they felt that by having one message for everybody, it almost fit nobody because they had to water it down so much to make sense to every single segment. Now, with Mutiny, they have all of their customers segmented, and everybody sees a different message, different feature set. They're able to really shorten what they put in front of the customer. Customers, so their startups will not hear about really sophisticated, you know, equity management features that they simply don't care about and actually deters them potentially from using Carta. Investors will only hear about the investor product that they have, etc.

Yeah, so for everyone listening, think about your website as like your best salesperson, and if your good salesperson gets on the phone you know how to shift that conversation based on the person that's on the other end of the phone, and your website doesn't do that shifting unless you use a product like Mutiny. So definitely check it out. I want to shift into kind of the back office of how, how you've grown the company, because you have the playbook for this fast-growing Silicon Valley-based company. So both Gusto and Mutiny have scaled really quickly. What kind of growth hacks did you borrow from your early days at Gusto?

Well, you know, I always get asked this question of, you know, what are the best channels that we should be using? And I think when I started in marketing, I had a similar perspective. I was always looking for the silver bullet. And what I learned is you actually just have to be really fast and experimentation-oriented. So you start with a kernel of insight about your customers. You get that through talking to customers and diving deep into what are the problems that they're trying to solve and how are they spending their time, what are they reading, what are they doing. Out of that might come an insight around a program that you want to build. Then from there, it's just a matter of how quickly do you ship the first version and get out there so that you can start to get results, and then iterating from there. I kind of have this process by which you break down a large problem by essentially first defining, well, what is the problem? What is the thing that we want to achieve? Maybe it's getting 100,000 accountants across the US to become a partner of Gusto, or in our case, maybe working with agencies to promote mutiny. Then what we do is we essentially ask this, like we put on what we call black hat and we say, "Well, let's assume that it's 2 years from now and it didn't work. What went wrong?" That helps us identify all of the critical levers for the program in order for it to actually work. So, you know, "Oh, there weren't that many agencies," or, "They didn't have enough customers in our ICP," or, "Personalization was too far of a reach from their existing core competency." You enumerate all of these things that are important, and then you essentially attach a metric to each one that if, hey, if this thing ends up being true, what's the metric that we would know that we're in a good place with respect to this lever? We just kind of order them because if lever 1 doesn't work, then it doesn't really matter. If they're not interested in it, it doesn't matter that it's scalable, right? Then you start tackling them, tackling these smaller problems in a much, much faster way. The big focus is always ship it. Don't sit there and plan and plan and plan. Make sure that you get out there with the content as fast as possible. In my opinion, even if you're trying to design the world's biggest program or build this really big, hairy feature. In a week, you should be able to get early signals on it to decide whether you should invest another month into it. And so I always, you know, with my team, as soon as we come up with something, I'm like, great, where are we going to be at the end of the week?

So that, that was going to be my next question. This experimentation process you've got, it sounds like you've got a pretty formalized approach for how you do this. So what, what is the meeting What's the cadence like, or what's the cycle, or is it weekly sprints always, or does it start with the experimentation squad and then it gets handed off once it's working to a different team? How do you do that?

I mean, I think as your team gets bigger, you can certainly formalize the process. You know, I think at times with Gusto, when we were attacking new verticals, you know, and we had a team of, product people and designers and marketers, you know, we developed more formal structure around that process where we would meet once a week, ideate, everybody would vote on the ideas, and then we would pick the top ones and we would do a weekly sprint. And, and then the subsequent week we would have a learning meeting where we would share the results of What had we learned? Because the whole point of experimentation is you are encouraging speed of getting things out there and speed of learning, as opposed to perfection or being on brand and doing a bunch of random things. It's all centered around, like, "Okay, what did we learn from that?" and shutting things down as soon as you learn that this was a great hypothesis, but it's not going to end up working for us. At Mutiny, we're a much smaller team, so we don't actually really have We don't have something formal around it. We have a process by which we do the planning and breaking down the problem, but then we essentially just have a weekly meeting where we, in a less formal way, do what I just described, where we talk through, okay, what did we learn last week? What's the most important thing going into next week? Focus how we spend our time for the following week based on what the cumulative knowledge that we have so far.

It sounds like you've got an experimentation kind of culture, which I think is really valuable for people listening, that everyone should be building these experiments and meetings and, you know, the thing you put on the black hat and think ahead to figure out the problems. My wife right now is doing these worksheets with my son for doing little science experiments with hypotheses and things around the house. And it's the same thing for your business. Like if you could do a one-page experiment on a growth channel or something that could work, that's a great recommendation. So thank you for that. So I guess as we round things out here, I'm curious how has your process or procedures evolved over the last couple years that Mutiny has been around?

Yeah, I mean, we've done, I would say a couple of things in terms of process that has worked really well for us. We've always been very goal-oriented. From the very beginning, we're building this data-driven marketing platform that's centered around personalization. There are so many different components or things that you can do within that, and it's going to be a 10-year journey for us to build that. What we did is applying the same kind of hypothesis formation. We broke that down into smaller components of things that have to be true, as well as metrics attached to each one. The way we've approached building the business has been always having an eye on these hypotheses in the back of our heads and being able to compare our progress against what we think, "Okay, problem solved," is, where the metric needs to be for us to be able to kind of check that as, "Okay, we've solved this problem." Then what we do is we have our next business milestone very clearly in mind, so we know where we want to be in the next— usually, it's like 12 to 18 months is sort of the window for the business where we know we want to be as a whole. Then we back into what is our quarterly plan, and that usually follows. A retro. We would take a look back at the previous quarter. We would look at where we are against the hypotheses and what we learned in the market, whether it's customer experience, NPS, or conversion results from sales. Then we articulate, "Okay, here's the biggest problem that we need to be solving as a company in the subsequent quarter." Then we organize our offsites around that problem, so we break that down and we come up with what are the what are the 3 most impactful projects that we could be doing across go-to-market and product in order to tackle that problem? And then, you know, at the end of the offsite, we basically exit the offsite with, these are the 3 key OKRs, so the 3 objectives, as well as the key results that are going to help us decide whether we've reached this objective or not. And that's a process that we follow every quarter. It's also a process that we do every week. So we kick off every Monday. With the week's OKRs. We close every week with, with a retro on the OKRs for that week, as well as what's the most important thing next week.

I think everyone that's listening is probably starting to hear a theme from all of our episodes, which is you've got to operationalize your goals and have a process for getting them done. And so beautiful example there. And then operationalizing or perfecting a process around experimentation, so important. Important and having a process around how you personalize your messaging for each customer. Great suggestions. As we wrap this up, we've got what's called the double tap, which is just 5 questions that you can say the first thing that you think of. So let's give it a try.

Okay, great. All right.

What's a brand you think has perfected its process?

Um, I think Intercom, probably, as far as a B2B is concerned, is a pretty interesting Same brand. I think they take a good amount of risk. They create really good content. They integrate design into everything that they're doing. So I'm usually impressed with a lot of the stuff that they put out.

Yeah, good one. We use them. Who's someone that's coached or mentored you?

I've had a lot of really great mentors, I would say, over the years, but the one that most recently comes to mind, Lexi Reed. At Gusto. She was our COO. And she really taught me how to show more of my personality as a leader. I think I hadn't had great role models for leaders who— where you could see the person. And there was a lot of— as an engineer, like, I lead with objective data. And figuring out kind of like how to be a whole person to the team was something that she taught me.

I love that. I love that. Favorite book or podcast?

Ooh, The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.

Nice, oldie. Most entertaining person you follow online?

Oh my gosh. I follow a lot of comedians on Instagram. So the two that I probably forward their stuff the most is, one is Trey Kennedy and the other one is Matt, I think it's pronounced Buchel. They're— Matt is a composer and a comedian, and Trey is a comedian, and so they're constantly creating these shorts, and I've gotten so many of my friends hooked on them.

I'm gonna look them up right after this. Last question: what's one app you can't live without?

Google Maps.

Good one. No one said that, but I agree. All right, so thank you so much for all the feedback. If people want to connect with you, Mutiny, where can they find LinkedIn is usually the best place to find me. Alright everyone, look Jaleh up on LinkedIn, check out Mutiny, explore personalization and experimentation for your business, and thanks again for tuning in for Process Makes Perfect. Thanks again, Jaleh.

Thanks for having me.

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